Widespread Skype Outage Prevents Some Users From Signing In, Making Voice Calls

If you’ve been having trouble with Skype today, you aren’t alone: after customers in the U.S., Japan and Europe reported difficulty signing in and making calls, Skype said that a technical issue with the app had caused some people’s online contacts to appear as if they were offline, even when they were signed into Microsoft’s Internet calling service.

The company didn’t clarify how many of its 300 million or so users worldwide were affected early this morning. The glitch is causing issues because if you appear to be offline even when you aren’t, your friends aren’t going to know if they can call you or not. People were still able to send and receive written online messages to their Skype contacts, however.

“We have identified the network issue which prevented users from logging in and using Skype today,” the company said in a statement (h/t to The Verge) “We’re in the process of reconnecting our users, and focused on restoring full service.”

Others had issues signing into the service, Skype said, noting that the problems haven’t affected Skype for Business users.

“We’re doing everything we can to fix this issue and hope to have another update for you soon,” Skype said in a statement.

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